Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors (2022)
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors (2022)
Chapter Five: Late August
Several people mock-groaned or whooped, followed by a smattering of applause. Zoe checked her phone; she had been there less than ten minutes. For the first exercise, Kyle asked the group to go around the semicircle, each person shouting out how they felt in that moment. Excited! Nervous! Horny! Ready to do this! Grateful! Loved up! Motivated! Sexy as hell!
“Broke,” said Zoe when it came to her turn.
“Sorry, was that ‘broken’?” asked Kyle.
She repeated her word.
“That’s great, Zoe,” said Kyle. “Although I think we’d call that more of a state than an emotion.”
“It’s a pretty emotional state when you’re in it,” said Zoe.
Tali glanced sideways at her disapprovingly, but the other girl, the pretty bulldog, met her eyes and smirked. Zoe had always been good at connecting with one other person in a group this way. “Connection through rejection” or “bad-behavior bonding” was what her counselor at the therapeutic boarding school she’d been sent to called it (75).
After they’d stretched and sat up, Kyle told them they would be working in couples for the final exercise. Zoe was relieved to be paired with the girl who’d seemed amused by her earlier. Kyle instructed them to press their palms to their partner’s and make short, declarative statements about themselves starting with “I am” and “I am not.”
Zoe pushed her palms to the girl’s, who introduced herself as Portia. Up close she was more sultry than pretty, with a slightly upturned nose and full, pillowy lips colored a dark plum. She had a diamond stud in her cheek where a dimple might have been. They eyed each other shyly.
“Go on, girls,” said Kyle. “I am …”
“I am thinking this is a load of horseshit,” muttered Portia as Kyle retreated, rolling her dark eyes around the studio.
“I am not disagreeing with you,” replied Zoe.
“I am only here because my psychiatrist suggested it.”
“I am not here because I want to be,” said Zoe. “My crazy roommate convinced me.”
“I am ready to start drinking heavily.” Portia grinned.
Zoe laughed. “I am not opposed.”
Accelerated intimacy, that’s what Zoe was good at. She’d learned early that it was quicker to bond with another person over what you didn’t like than what you did, and that the easiest way to feel close to someone was to do something transgressive together. That’s why smokers always made friends. Her counselor after the seizure incident had suggested that this was part of what got Zoe into trouble, but Zoe still didn’t see it as problematic behavior. So far it had always worked for her. Tali, who had looked over when they started laughing, frowned at Zoe from across the room (78).
“I don’t think white women like me much,” said Zoe. She stopped to think about this. “Or any women, for that matter.”
“At least all men seem to like you,” said Audrey. Cleo looked at her disapprovingly. “I’m kidding!” she added. “Kind of.”
“You really think women don’t like you?” asked Cleo.
“I don’t know,” Zoe said quickly. “I’m generalizing. In my psych class we read this study that said what men feared most was pity, and what women feared most was envy. And it resonated with me. For a guy envy can be empowering, but for a girl it just means you’re going to get attacked or excluded.”
Zoe looked furtively at the others’ faces. She felt as though she had just exposed some hidden part of herself to them, a truth she had always felt but never articulated, and was afraid they might call her arrogant or delusional. But they were both nodding.
“I get that,” said Audrey. “That’s why girls always bounce back compliments. Like, if you say you like my hair, then I have to be all, no it’s so gross and lank, your hair is amazing!”
Cleo laughed. “But if you tell a man he has nice hair,” she said, “he’s like, thanks, and my cock is huge” (88).
Chapter Seven: Late September
She left a note on the table, too much, but she could not wait, she was being carried on the breeze away from the café to the church, where the boy’s incredulous friends stood waiting, onto the back of a bike that shuddered to life beneath her, then zipped her down one cobbled street after another, out of the lights of the town and into the blue-black night. The ashtray lay forgotten on the table.
On the back of the bike, the world softened and smeared. She stretched her arms out either side of her and grabbed palms full of solid air. The night was a thousand black butterfly wings beating against her skin. Cleo understood why bikes were so often described as freedom; not for their ability to take you elsewhere, but for the way they transformed the place you already were.
They raced toward the lights at the foot of the hill and pulled up in front of an aging bar on the corner of a quiet residential street. A neon martini glass blinked blue, pink, blue, pink in the window. The boy jumped off and held his hand out for her to dismount. When she stood, she shook all over as though an engine was still revving inside her (115-6).
Chapter Eight: October
Everything about this tasteful Botanical Gardens gift shop makes me want to spend money. Would I ever use a pair of pruning shears in the shape of a pelican? Who’s to say?
I find a tea towel that reads “You don’t stop gardening because you get old, you get old because you stop gardening.” This seems apt for my green-fingered and aphoristically inclined mother, so I buy it for her.
I’m making my way to the exit when I notice a Frisbee that says “You don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.” Then I pass a mannequin wearing an apron embroidered with “You don’t stop baking because you get old, you get old because you stop baking.” Then I notice the sign by the bookshelf. “You don’t stop reading because …”
When I tell my mother this on the drive home, she laughs so hard she upends the potted daffodils on her knee.
“You don’t stop bullshitting because you get old,” she says.
“You get old because life’s bullshit,” I say (128).
I find this line of poetry by Sáenz and email it to my mother:
I want to dream a sky / Full of hummingbirds.
I would like to die in such a storm.
She replies:
I think I’d rather die in my sleep like Auntie Louise (146).
I am dancing slowly, arms outstretched, to Wham’s “Last Christmas.” This is my favorite song of all time. It is full of pathos and insight. Perhaps the real tragedy here is not that George Michael’s heart was given away, but that this beautiful song is relegated to only one month of the year, when its message of unrequited love leading to a deepening resolve to choose more deserving partners is undeniably relevant year-round.
“You don’t usually drink much, do you, hon?” is what Jacky says when I tell her this (151).
Chapter Nine: January
“I’m going to say something, and I want you to hear me.”
“Okay.”
“You are nothing like your father.” She rolled back off him, so they were side by side. Somewhere near them, Jesus leaped from one surface to another with a soft thud. Frank lay with his eyes open, trying to listen for her next move.
“Cley?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“What was your mom like? You never talk about her.”
“She was a lot of different people,” she said quietly.
Frank stayed silent. If Cleo was ready to talk, she would. He didn’t want to push her.
“She made the best birthday cakes,” she began. “I think it’s because she was good at architectural models. Like one year, she made a cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower with a little doll that looked like me at the top. We’d been to Paris for the Easter holidays and completely loved it, so the whole party was French-themed. It was me and twenty other eleven-year-olds all wearing berets and playing games like pin the mustache on the Frenchman. My mum even bought us fake cigarettes from a joke shop, which I think was pretty scandalous at the time.”
“That’s funny,” said Frank. “What did she look like?”
“She had blond hair like me, but she was taller. She wore high heels every day and these tailored silk shirts. I used to go into her closet to rub them between my fingers, I just loved the way they felt.”
“She sounds very glamorous,” he said.
“She was,” agreed Cleo. “But then she had to start taking this medication that made her gain a lot of weight and sleep all the time. She was very active, you know, so she hated that. I think that’s why she stopped taking it eventually.”
“When was that?”
“That was when she and my dad got divorced. I had to go stay with him and Miriam in Bristol because she needed to live in the hospital for a while. Then she got better, and I came home. When she was well, she could tell what kind of day you’d had just by the way you said hello. She’d want to know everything about what I was thinking, what I was reading in school. I’d sit on the kitchen counter and chat to her while she made dinner. But she’d have these bad periods where she’d stop sleeping or eating much. She’d get so focused on a project you could say her name ten times and she wouldn’t hear you. I hated that. It was like you didn’t exist. She’d talk to herself and laugh. She had a lot of random men over. I’d walk in on them in the bathroom sometimes. The first time she tried to kill herself was during one of those periods.”
“I’m so sorry, Cley,” he said. “Fuck.”
“Then she got on a new medication,” she said, the words pouring out fast now. “And she was normal again for a while. She went back to work, and I moved out to go to uni, and she started dating this guy seriously, someone actually nice for a change. He was another architect. Then something happened, I guess they broke up, and she went off her medication again. I didn’t know that at the time, the doctors told me afterward. She died when I was in my final year. She had a little bit of money left, not much, and it all went to me. But I was depressed, like I told you, so that’s when I came here to do my MFA. I started taking antidepressants and making more art and things got better. And then I met you, and that was the best thing really, the best thing that had happened in years.”
Frank turned onto his side and wrapped his arms and legs around her. He held her as tight as he could without hurting her. He could hear the soft boom of her heartbeat beneath his ear.
“You’re not going to be anything like your mom,” he said.
Jesus leaped onto the bed near them and bounced off again, her tiny body barely leaving a dent in the covers.
“How do you know?” she said. Her voice in the dark was plaintive.
“Because you have me.”
“But what about if something happens to you? Or you go away?”
“It won’t. I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“I swear on Jesus” (174-5).
Chapter Twelve: Still March
“I could read to you?” he asked.
He decided to take her silence as assent.
“Please excuse my accent,” he said, clearing his throat.
He was not familiar with the book, which was a collection of short stories with a sepia picture of an older woman standing in a field on the cover. She had a shock of white hair and a tough, good-humored look. The stories were very short, some only a page or two long, and it often seemed that nothing very much was happening in them, until something startling and irreconcilable did. In one, four young boys played between the train cars, annoying the other passengers, until one fell forward and was crushed beneath the wheels. In another, the narrator’s friend called to tell her she was dying, to which the narrator replied, “We’re all dying,” but then the friend did indeed die, and she was very sad. In another, entitled simply “Wants,” a woman ran into her ex-husband on the steps of the library. He accused her of not wanting anything, but she said she did have wants, which included being a different person, ending the war for her children, staying married to one person her whole life, and being able to bring back library books on time. Except the woman did not say this out loud, she said it only to herself and the reader, so no one would ever know but them.
From the bed, Cleo murmured something so softly he did not catch it. He leaned forward and put his ear close to her mouth. He could smell the sweet, yeasty scent of her breath.
“I want my mum,” she said (234).
Chapter Sixteen: August
I do think about it. I think about it for a week straight. I find my mother in the garden potting her fall perennials. She looks up at me and rubs soil on her forehead with the back of her gardening glove.
“Do you know how Nietzsche defined a joke?” she says. “As an epigram on the death of a feeling.”
“Ma,” I say. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“Isn’t that brilliant? Nietzsche rocks my world.”
“It’s about my living situation.”
“I gave you Thus Spoke Zarathustra when you were fifteen and having your first existential crisis,” she says. “Do you still have it?”
“Frank asked me something the other day.”
“Nietzsche had a poet’s soul,” she says. “Like you.”
I grab a trowel and start digging. I am never leaving (346).
Chapter Seventeen: January
She loved New York, but it was not her city, she knew that now. It suited her to be part of this intricate network of European capitals, each only a few hours away from the others, each containing its Caravaggios and Sorollas and Soutines. She had even started talking to her father more, now they were only an hour time difference apart.
And she was discovering that the slower pace of Rome soothed her. She was industrious, but never exhausted. She slept deeply and alone. She had not yet taken a lover, though one of the other artists, a shy Swiss designer her age, had confessed his feelings for her late one night in the studio. She needed more time, she’d told him gently. In the afternoons she drank espresso standing at the bar and watched the Italians flit busily around each other like butterflies. She had finally learned to be by herself in public without thinking about what others were thinking of her. It was a relief to live from the inside out at long last.
“Trying too,” she said.
Frank nodded, satisfied. “You want to show me the installation piece?”
She led him to a small shed behind the studio building. Cleo opened the door to reveal a square white room with a projector set up in the center facing the ceiling. Dark soil covered the floor. The smell of it hit him in a nauseating wave, earthy, rich, and sweet.
“Cley …” He hovered in the doorway.
“I know,” she said. “Please. Just lie down.”
He lay down on the earth, still sick with the smell of it. Cleo turned the projector on, and the room turned red. She lay down next to him. Crimson light wavered across the ceiling like the wrinkles on a poppy petal. The smell of soil was everywhere, tugging him back to that moment …
What surprised him was the rush of anger he felt returning to it. He had been the one to find her and call the ambulance, kneeling in the soil all blackened with her blood, and now here was Cleo, making it into art. Sticking a crystal up herself and calling it healing. The room had turned a blood-drenched carmine. Well, good for her. He was glad to be rid of her. He had used that violence too, to propel himself out of their marriage into a relationship with a sane woman. Thank god. He wanted to sit up and tell her about the divorce papers. He wanted a drink. He wanted a thousand drinks. He wanted to take fistfuls of earth and grind them into his eyes and scream like a baby. He wanted his mother, not his actual mother, that self-involved drunk, but his real mother, still unfound, the woman who could truly take care of him. He wanted Eleanor.
“Cleo,” he sat up. “I can’t, I can’t.”
Cleo put her hand on his arm, but he pushed it away. “It’s too much, Cley.” He shocked himself by bursting into tears. “Too much.”
He bowed his head in his hands and sobbed. He could not remember the last time he’d cried. It was an exorcism of tears. Cleo pulled him forward and cradled his head in her lap. She had not wanted to hurt him, but she needed him to see this. Their whole marriage, she had submitted to other people’s versions of her, retreating into the shape of their desires. She thought of Frank’s vow on their wedding day. When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light. Now she had completed that process on her own. She had met the darkest part of herself and created this.
Around them, the room changed color to a deep amber. Music began to play. It was an undulating juggernaut of keening guitars and synthesizers, a deep, swelling, expansive sound. Then the shed turned a brilliant blue. They were in a box of sky, streaked with the white vapors of clouds. Life Lines. Here were hers. She had found a way to choose her life. So must he.
“Divorce,” he said into her lap.
“I know,” she said, stroking his hair. “I knew” (360-1).
Chapter Five: Late August
Several people mock-groaned or whooped, followed by a smattering of applause. Zoe checked her phone; she had been there less than ten minutes. For the first exercise, Kyle asked the group to go around the semicircle, each person shouting out how they felt in that moment. Excited! Nervous! Horny! Ready to do this! Grateful! Loved up! Motivated! Sexy as hell!
“Broke,” said Zoe when it came to her turn.
“Sorry, was that ‘broken’?” asked Kyle.
She repeated her word.
“That’s great, Zoe,” said Kyle. “Although I think we’d call that more of a state than an emotion.”
“It’s a pretty emotional state when you’re in it,” said Zoe.
Tali glanced sideways at her disapprovingly, but the other girl, the pretty bulldog, met her eyes and smirked. Zoe had always been good at connecting with one other person in a group this way. “Connection through rejection” or “bad-behavior bonding” was what her counselor at the therapeutic boarding school she’d been sent to called it (75).
After they’d stretched and sat up, Kyle told them they would be working in couples for the final exercise. Zoe was relieved to be paired with the girl who’d seemed amused by her earlier. Kyle instructed them to press their palms to their partner’s and make short, declarative statements about themselves starting with “I am” and “I am not.”
Zoe pushed her palms to the girl’s, who introduced herself as Portia. Up close she was more sultry than pretty, with a slightly upturned nose and full, pillowy lips colored a dark plum. She had a diamond stud in her cheek where a dimple might have been. They eyed each other shyly.
“Go on, girls,” said Kyle. “I am …”
“I am thinking this is a load of horseshit,” muttered Portia as Kyle retreated, rolling her dark eyes around the studio.
“I am not disagreeing with you,” replied Zoe.
“I am only here because my psychiatrist suggested it.”
“I am not here because I want to be,” said Zoe. “My crazy roommate convinced me.”
“I am ready to start drinking heavily.” Portia grinned.
Zoe laughed. “I am not opposed.”
Accelerated intimacy, that’s what Zoe was good at. She’d learned early that it was quicker to bond with another person over what you didn’t like than what you did, and that the easiest way to feel close to someone was to do something transgressive together. That’s why smokers always made friends. Her counselor after the seizure incident had suggested that this was part of what got Zoe into trouble, but Zoe still didn’t see it as problematic behavior. So far it had always worked for her. Tali, who had looked over when they started laughing, frowned at Zoe from across the room (78).
“I don’t think white women like me much,” said Zoe. She stopped to think about this. “Or any women, for that matter.”
“At least all men seem to like you,” said Audrey. Cleo looked at her disapprovingly. “I’m kidding!” she added. “Kind of.”
“You really think women don’t like you?” asked Cleo.
“I don’t know,” Zoe said quickly. “I’m generalizing. In my psych class we read this study that said what men feared most was pity, and what women feared most was envy. And it resonated with me. For a guy envy can be empowering, but for a girl it just means you’re going to get attacked or excluded.”
Zoe looked furtively at the others’ faces. She felt as though she had just exposed some hidden part of herself to them, a truth she had always felt but never articulated, and was afraid they might call her arrogant or delusional. But they were both nodding.
“I get that,” said Audrey. “That’s why girls always bounce back compliments. Like, if you say you like my hair, then I have to be all, no it’s so gross and lank, your hair is amazing!”
Cleo laughed. “But if you tell a man he has nice hair,” she said, “he’s like, thanks, and my cock is huge” (88).
Chapter Seven: Late September
She left a note on the table, too much, but she could not wait, she was being carried on the breeze away from the café to the church, where the boy’s incredulous friends stood waiting, onto the back of a bike that shuddered to life beneath her, then zipped her down one cobbled street after another, out of the lights of the town and into the blue-black night. The ashtray lay forgotten on the table.
On the back of the bike, the world softened and smeared. She stretched her arms out either side of her and grabbed palms full of solid air. The night was a thousand black butterfly wings beating against her skin. Cleo understood why bikes were so often described as freedom; not for their ability to take you elsewhere, but for the way they transformed the place you already were.
They raced toward the lights at the foot of the hill and pulled up in front of an aging bar on the corner of a quiet residential street. A neon martini glass blinked blue, pink, blue, pink in the window. The boy jumped off and held his hand out for her to dismount. When she stood, she shook all over as though an engine was still revving inside her (115-6).
Chapter Eight: October
Everything about this tasteful Botanical Gardens gift shop makes me want to spend money. Would I ever use a pair of pruning shears in the shape of a pelican? Who’s to say?
I find a tea towel that reads “You don’t stop gardening because you get old, you get old because you stop gardening.” This seems apt for my green-fingered and aphoristically inclined mother, so I buy it for her.
I’m making my way to the exit when I notice a Frisbee that says “You don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.” Then I pass a mannequin wearing an apron embroidered with “You don’t stop baking because you get old, you get old because you stop baking.” Then I notice the sign by the bookshelf. “You don’t stop reading because …”
When I tell my mother this on the drive home, she laughs so hard she upends the potted daffodils on her knee.
“You don’t stop bullshitting because you get old,” she says.
“You get old because life’s bullshit,” I say (128).
I find this line of poetry by Sáenz and email it to my mother:
I want to dream a sky / Full of hummingbirds.
I would like to die in such a storm.
She replies:
I think I’d rather die in my sleep like Auntie Louise (146).
I am dancing slowly, arms outstretched, to Wham’s “Last Christmas.” This is my favorite song of all time. It is full of pathos and insight. Perhaps the real tragedy here is not that George Michael’s heart was given away, but that this beautiful song is relegated to only one month of the year, when its message of unrequited love leading to a deepening resolve to choose more deserving partners is undeniably relevant year-round.
“You don’t usually drink much, do you, hon?” is what Jacky says when I tell her this (151).
Chapter Nine: January
“I’m going to say something, and I want you to hear me.”
“Okay.”
“You are nothing like your father.” She rolled back off him, so they were side by side. Somewhere near them, Jesus leaped from one surface to another with a soft thud. Frank lay with his eyes open, trying to listen for her next move.
“Cley?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“What was your mom like? You never talk about her.”
“She was a lot of different people,” she said quietly.
Frank stayed silent. If Cleo was ready to talk, she would. He didn’t want to push her.
“She made the best birthday cakes,” she began. “I think it’s because she was good at architectural models. Like one year, she made a cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower with a little doll that looked like me at the top. We’d been to Paris for the Easter holidays and completely loved it, so the whole party was French-themed. It was me and twenty other eleven-year-olds all wearing berets and playing games like pin the mustache on the Frenchman. My mum even bought us fake cigarettes from a joke shop, which I think was pretty scandalous at the time.”
“That’s funny,” said Frank. “What did she look like?”
“She had blond hair like me, but she was taller. She wore high heels every day and these tailored silk shirts. I used to go into her closet to rub them between my fingers, I just loved the way they felt.”
“She sounds very glamorous,” he said.
“She was,” agreed Cleo. “But then she had to start taking this medication that made her gain a lot of weight and sleep all the time. She was very active, you know, so she hated that. I think that’s why she stopped taking it eventually.”
“When was that?”
“That was when she and my dad got divorced. I had to go stay with him and Miriam in Bristol because she needed to live in the hospital for a while. Then she got better, and I came home. When she was well, she could tell what kind of day you’d had just by the way you said hello. She’d want to know everything about what I was thinking, what I was reading in school. I’d sit on the kitchen counter and chat to her while she made dinner. But she’d have these bad periods where she’d stop sleeping or eating much. She’d get so focused on a project you could say her name ten times and she wouldn’t hear you. I hated that. It was like you didn’t exist. She’d talk to herself and laugh. She had a lot of random men over. I’d walk in on them in the bathroom sometimes. The first time she tried to kill herself was during one of those periods.”
“I’m so sorry, Cley,” he said. “Fuck.”
“Then she got on a new medication,” she said, the words pouring out fast now. “And she was normal again for a while. She went back to work, and I moved out to go to uni, and she started dating this guy seriously, someone actually nice for a change. He was another architect. Then something happened, I guess they broke up, and she went off her medication again. I didn’t know that at the time, the doctors told me afterward. She died when I was in my final year. She had a little bit of money left, not much, and it all went to me. But I was depressed, like I told you, so that’s when I came here to do my MFA. I started taking antidepressants and making more art and things got better. And then I met you, and that was the best thing really, the best thing that had happened in years.”
Frank turned onto his side and wrapped his arms and legs around her. He held her as tight as he could without hurting her. He could hear the soft boom of her heartbeat beneath his ear.
“You’re not going to be anything like your mom,” he said.
Jesus leaped onto the bed near them and bounced off again, her tiny body barely leaving a dent in the covers.
“How do you know?” she said. Her voice in the dark was plaintive.
“Because you have me.”
“But what about if something happens to you? Or you go away?”
“It won’t. I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“I swear on Jesus” (174-5).
Chapter Twelve: Still March
“I could read to you?” he asked.
He decided to take her silence as assent.
“Please excuse my accent,” he said, clearing his throat.
He was not familiar with the book, which was a collection of short stories with a sepia picture of an older woman standing in a field on the cover. She had a shock of white hair and a tough, good-humored look. The stories were very short, some only a page or two long, and it often seemed that nothing very much was happening in them, until something startling and irreconcilable did. In one, four young boys played between the train cars, annoying the other passengers, until one fell forward and was crushed beneath the wheels. In another, the narrator’s friend called to tell her she was dying, to which the narrator replied, “We’re all dying,” but then the friend did indeed die, and she was very sad. In another, entitled simply “Wants,” a woman ran into her ex-husband on the steps of the library. He accused her of not wanting anything, but she said she did have wants, which included being a different person, ending the war for her children, staying married to one person her whole life, and being able to bring back library books on time. Except the woman did not say this out loud, she said it only to herself and the reader, so no one would ever know but them.
From the bed, Cleo murmured something so softly he did not catch it. He leaned forward and put his ear close to her mouth. He could smell the sweet, yeasty scent of her breath.
“I want my mum,” she said (234).
Chapter Sixteen: August
I do think about it. I think about it for a week straight. I find my mother in the garden potting her fall perennials. She looks up at me and rubs soil on her forehead with the back of her gardening glove.
“Do you know how Nietzsche defined a joke?” she says. “As an epigram on the death of a feeling.”
“Ma,” I say. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“Isn’t that brilliant? Nietzsche rocks my world.”
“It’s about my living situation.”
“I gave you Thus Spoke Zarathustra when you were fifteen and having your first existential crisis,” she says. “Do you still have it?”
“Frank asked me something the other day.”
“Nietzsche had a poet’s soul,” she says. “Like you.”
I grab a trowel and start digging. I am never leaving (346).
Chapter Seventeen: January
She loved New York, but it was not her city, she knew that now. It suited her to be part of this intricate network of European capitals, each only a few hours away from the others, each containing its Caravaggios and Sorollas and Soutines. She had even started talking to her father more, now they were only an hour time difference apart.
And she was discovering that the slower pace of Rome soothed her. She was industrious, but never exhausted. She slept deeply and alone. She had not yet taken a lover, though one of the other artists, a shy Swiss designer her age, had confessed his feelings for her late one night in the studio. She needed more time, she’d told him gently. In the afternoons she drank espresso standing at the bar and watched the Italians flit busily around each other like butterflies. She had finally learned to be by herself in public without thinking about what others were thinking of her. It was a relief to live from the inside out at long last.
“Trying too,” she said.
Frank nodded, satisfied. “You want to show me the installation piece?”
She led him to a small shed behind the studio building. Cleo opened the door to reveal a square white room with a projector set up in the center facing the ceiling. Dark soil covered the floor. The smell of it hit him in a nauseating wave, earthy, rich, and sweet.
“Cley …” He hovered in the doorway.
“I know,” she said. “Please. Just lie down.”
He lay down on the earth, still sick with the smell of it. Cleo turned the projector on, and the room turned red. She lay down next to him. Crimson light wavered across the ceiling like the wrinkles on a poppy petal. The smell of soil was everywhere, tugging him back to that moment …
What surprised him was the rush of anger he felt returning to it. He had been the one to find her and call the ambulance, kneeling in the soil all blackened with her blood, and now here was Cleo, making it into art. Sticking a crystal up herself and calling it healing. The room had turned a blood-drenched carmine. Well, good for her. He was glad to be rid of her. He had used that violence too, to propel himself out of their marriage into a relationship with a sane woman. Thank god. He wanted to sit up and tell her about the divorce papers. He wanted a drink. He wanted a thousand drinks. He wanted to take fistfuls of earth and grind them into his eyes and scream like a baby. He wanted his mother, not his actual mother, that self-involved drunk, but his real mother, still unfound, the woman who could truly take care of him. He wanted Eleanor.
“Cleo,” he sat up. “I can’t, I can’t.”
Cleo put her hand on his arm, but he pushed it away. “It’s too much, Cley.” He shocked himself by bursting into tears. “Too much.”
He bowed his head in his hands and sobbed. He could not remember the last time he’d cried. It was an exorcism of tears. Cleo pulled him forward and cradled his head in her lap. She had not wanted to hurt him, but she needed him to see this. Their whole marriage, she had submitted to other people’s versions of her, retreating into the shape of their desires. She thought of Frank’s vow on their wedding day. When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light. Now she had completed that process on her own. She had met the darkest part of herself and created this.
Around them, the room changed color to a deep amber. Music began to play. It was an undulating juggernaut of keening guitars and synthesizers, a deep, swelling, expansive sound. Then the shed turned a brilliant blue. They were in a box of sky, streaked with the white vapors of clouds. Life Lines. Here were hers. She had found a way to choose her life. So must he.
“Divorce,” he said into her lap.
“I know,” she said, stroking his hair. “I knew” (360-1).